Local slave notices recall terrible tales from past

Historic group tracks history

NEW PALTZ — His name was Jack. The notice in the "Poughkeepsie Journal" said he was slightly built and had a sprightly walk. Jack was 20 years old and blind in one eye. He spoke good English and played the flute.

NEW PALTZ — His name was Jack. The notice in the "Poughkeepsie Journal" said he was slightly built and had a sprightly walk. Jack was 20 years old and blind in one eye. He spoke good English and played the flute.

Jack had a price on his head. He was worth $20 to his Dutchess County master, who had incurred the additional expense of posting a runaway slave notice in the newspaper in October 1795. The $20 reward was predicated on Jack's being returned to his owner's door. If Jack's deliverer could do no better than stick Jack in a local jail, necessitating extra travel time and expense on his owner's part, the going price for Jack was $10.

No one knows what became of Jack. Like most slaves of his time, he had no last name and lies buried somewhere in an unmarked grave.

That any part of Jack's life has survived his times is something of a miracle. He had no more standing in society than a horse or a piece of furniture. His story, short as it is, is the result of Susan Stessin-Cohn's dogged pursuit of the ephemeral and forgotten histories of the men, women and children whose value as human beings was commonly assessed by the same measures as those of livestock.

Indeed, some slaves were branded with their owners' names; others were forced to wear "slave collars" with their owners' names engraved in flowing script on them.

Stessin-Cohn is director of education at Historic Huguenot Street. Her presentation, "Pretends to be Free," drew a crowd Sunday to the society's Deyo Hall. She and society staffers and interns have unearthed nearly 300 runaway slave notices from the region, each one a tantalizing and terrible story at whose full histories only can be guessed.

Her search for the runaway slave notices has sent Stessin-Cohn through familiar historical fields, including HHS's archives, the Ulster County Hall of Records, Kingston's Senate House, and 18th- and 19th-century local and national newspapers, as well as such "invaluable" websites as ancestry.com and Hudson HRVH.org.

What better way, Stessin-Cohn said, to commemorate Black History Month than by exploring as far as possible the people whose life stories have been buried in history's unmarked grave?

It can come as no surprise that some of the same families whose names history has not forgotten — Hasbrouck, Hardenburgh, LeFevre — also were slave owners who branded and chained their slaves and hired men to find their property when that property went missing. It's an irony of which Stessin-Cohn only is too aware. She quotes SUNY New Paltz black history professor A. J. Williams-Myers, who once told her "slavery is slavery — there's no way to sugarcoat it."

"I look at it as a time when humanity had gone mad." Stessin-Cohn said. "It's so overwhelming. People just don't want to talk about it."

Williams-Myers said last week the mid-Hudson region was the "embryo" out which slavery grew and prospered in the state. In 1790, the year of the first census, New York had 21,000 slaves.

There's only one way, he said to purge that psychic legacy:

"For us to move on, we have to own it — that was us. We can't say we weren't there and just ignore it. New York was a slave state."

The image that burns brightest in Stessin-Cohn's mind when she thinks of slavery is of a woman desperately trying to cling to her baby as mother and child are being sold separately at auction.

Stessin-Cohn's job at the society is part-time, yet hers is a full-time obsession. It began about 10 years ago when she discovered the Haviland-Heidgood Historical Collection at New Paltz's Elting Memorial Library. She transcribed some of the collection's Civil War material.

"I was hooked. That was it," she said.

The unquestioning belief black slaves were less than human and how that fundamental belief poisoned whatever it touched is exemplified by the story of the Rev. James Murphy, a saga that Stessin-Cohn finds one of the most heartbreaking stories she's discovered.

Murphy was a wildly popular white minister in the early to mid-1800s, the pastor of three Ulster County Dutch Reformed congregations. For reasons Stessin-Cohn can only guess at, Murphy's parentage came under suspicion by two female members of one of his congregations.

Murphy had indeed been, as he claimed, the son of one of Dutchess County's best-known families. His mother had been a slave. When the scion of the family died, he freed his son, who went on to become one of the region's most esteemed churchmen.

When his parentage finally was revealed, Stessin-Cohn believes he left the mid-Hudson region to escape the scandal.

The specifics of his story still are unknown. Stessin-Cohn found a single church record that hints at tragedy:

"... The indifference and neglect of the people whom he had served so well, together with the domestic trials that he was compelled to endure, had brought his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave."

His "noblest epitaph," the anonymous writer says, would be that "during his second ministry ... from 1843 to 1849, nearly 200 souls were converted unto God."

In the end, brilliant though he may have been, racism delivered him to the same fate as thousands of forgotten runaway slaves like Jack: Murphy's body, the church record reports, "lies buried in an unmarked grave, over which no loving hand has reared the meanest slab."